3 Social Media Monitoring Success Stories

Proliferating social media outlets make it tough for companies to craft cohesive marketing efforts. Fortunately, social media monitoring tools can help.

Companies know they need strong social media communications to benefit their brands. But the proliferation of social media outlets has made it a challenge to keep track of social media messaging, by customers, third parties or even different departments within the company. Social media monitoring tools are one way for companies to stay on top of these communications and craft comprehensive social media marketing efforts.

Enterprise Apps Today looked for some successful use cases of enterprise social media monitoring tools and found three interesting ones.

Small Business, Big Social Media Presence

Eurosuites Hotel, a small independent Miami hotel that caters primarily to extended stay occupants, competes not only with better known chain motels, but also with larger independents in the area.

"We opened five years ago, just when the economic crisis was starting. Two years ago, we still had a very low social media presence," said Barbara Sasina, the hotel's business development manager.

It wasn't that the hotel didn't know the importance of building a buzz on social media. But as a small hotel with a small budget, Eurosuites has always had to do more with less. It didn't have enough staff to sufficiently monitor Twitter, Facebook and Instagram chatter.

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The hotel found a solution to that issue in SumAll Insights, a social media monitoring solution that provides weekly, daily and monthly reports on social media traffic, engagement, customer comments and other social media metrics.

With the information from those reports, Eurosuites has been able to refine posting in terms of messages posted and the best times of day for posts; emphasize information about nearby entertainment; de-emphasize some of the local shopping information, which customers weren't as interested in; and make other changes to increase customer engagement. "We needed to ensure that the content that we were creating was having an impact. We wanted to increase our engagement with our customers," Safina said.

The hotel found that one of the best ways of doing that was to have cross-promotional social media efforts with entertainers who were performing nearby, Safina said.

She expects the hotel to dive deeper into the SumAll Insights data to further refine its engagement with customers.

Getting a Complete Social Media Picture

Udemy, a marketplace for sellers and purchasers of online courses and training materials, already had a tool for social media monitoring and reporting, but company executives didn't think it was providing the in-depth social media metrics they were seeking, said Shannon Hughes, the company's senior marketing director. "We didn't feel like we were getting the full picture of all of the social media conversations, so we couldn't react as quickly as we wanted to."

So Udemy turned to a social media monitoring and analytics tool from Cision.

Udemy uses Cision to schedule more than 20 tweets per day; create Desk.com tickets for all support-related tweets; monitor and track conversations on competitors and on industry-specific topics as well as any Udemy buzz from media, instructors and students across all channels; measure how Udemy is performing across all channels and compared to competitors; and determine what content is being shared, by whom, and the influence of those people on social media channels.

"We have more than 8 million students," Hughes said. "We have a lot of inbound requests going to our support team all of the time. Cision enables us to connect with the right people at the right time. It also allow us to know when people are tweeting at us."

As a result, Udemy has boosted the number of people who are actively engaged with the company as well as those who increase media awareness of the company, according to Hughes, who said raising Udemy's profile is critical to the company's long-term success.

Social Media Increases Sales Leads

Increasing engagement and responsiveness and getting a more complete picture of the customer are all important elements of generating additional sales leads.

Marketo, a company that sells marketing software, recently expanded its marketing efforts across the globe, meaning an expanded marketing team, making it more important than ever that marketing messages be comprehensive and unified across social media and other channels, said Mike Tomita, the company's senior manager of Web marketing.

"With more people on our team in the U.S. and globally, it's very important that our messaging follow a single [theme], that we don't have different people send out different messages," he said. "We want to make sure that as a company we have messages that tell a consistent story and that we are able to get our messages across in an easily digestible, coherent way."

To help ensure its messages remain on point, the company uses Hootsuite to schedule tweets, providing managers the ability to approve all messages before they go out.

Over the past few years social media has become an increasingly important part of the company’s marketing mix, Tomita said. Using Hootsuite has helped Marketo increase leads generated through social media by 47 percent over last year, a trend he doesn't anticipate slowing any time soon.